


Fury Oh Fury

by piggy09



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Dubious Consent, Dubious Morality, F/F, Unhealthy Relationships, Why tiptoe around clonecest when you can constantly point it out: a Propunk story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-02
Updated: 2015-01-02
Packaged: 2018-03-02 08:21:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2805902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>No</i>, thinks Sarah – Rachel Duncan, she knows, owns nothing. She especially does not own Sarah.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fury Oh Fury

**Author's Note:**

  * For [willowcabins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowcabins/gifts).



> Prompt: Rachel/Sarah, fighting  
> (CAN BE SEXUAL but does not have to be!!!!!!!!!!)
> 
> Hello Elisabeth! I hope you like this. The deadline kind of...snuck up on me...but hopefully it is to your satisfaction anyways.
> 
> (Note that both parties are consenting, here, but uh all hail the glorious return of Sarah "sex is a weapon" Manning. Also: Rachel Duncan.)

The first time isn’t even on purpose.

Sarah’s been going to these weekly “negotiations” with Rachel for…too long, now, considering what she’s gotten out of them. Which is nothing. This is the price they pay, all of them, for their relative freedom: every week Sarah prowls into the DYAD building, feeling like a thumbprint smudged on glass. Every week she makes her ways through the veins of the building until she reaches the office of her genetic identical, perched pristine on the other side of her desk like a doll posed and only waiting for Sarah to come to life.

Every week Sarah tries to get them basic human rights. Every week Rachel smiles and smiles and smiles, fake on her face as wax lips. When she opens her mouth all she does is lie, in a tone that says she’s sad to do it but _really_ Sarah there simply aren’t any other options. Every week. _Every_ week.

Part of Sarah doesn’t know why she’s still going. The other part is an uncomfortable twist beneath her ribs, something like hope. She is stupid for hoping, but she hopes that somewhere in the clockwork arteries of DYAD there is someone who cares about them. She hopes that somewhere in the clockwork arteries of Rachel Duncan there is blood, and a heart.

She is stupid for hoping, she _knows_ this. She’s looked in Rachel’s eyes – they’re not Sarah’s eyes. They’re full of some sharp and gleaming hunger, a jarring contrast to the honeyed words that fall from Rachel’s lips. Rachel _loves_ this. Rachel loves watching Sarah come back, week after week, and fight for herself, and Cosima, and Alison, and Helena. And Kira. (Always Kira.) There is nothing Rachel loves more; Sarah can see it, in all the muscles of her face, as different from the bitter reluctance on Sarah’s face as – well, as different as Rachel and Sarah are, really.

Rachel loves this. Sarah hates it. Sarah hates it more and more each week, as she snaps at the bait Rachel dangles – increased testing for Cosima’s cure, no gloved hands reaching for Kira until she turns 10 – 12 – 13, victories that aren’t that at all. Every week something in Sarah gets more knotted, sick and angry, tasting like the bitter remnants of hope. Makes it hard to breathe.

That doesn’t mean it was on purpose, though, because it _wasn’t_. Sarah’s sitting in some twisted glass monstrosity of a chair, taking up as much space as possible, watching as Rachel carves circles around the desk, the chairs, around Sarah. She settles in place next to Sarah’s chair, tilting her chin to look _down_ at Sarah; she’s murmuring something about cooperation and how Sarah will need to sign a set of papers if she wants to proceed and Sarah is – suddenly and viciously – sick of all this. Sick of sitting there and watching Rachel Duncan look down on her, and listening to Rachel talk down to her.

So she stands up, one violent surge of motion, so close to Rachel that they are almost touching. She’s a little shorter than Rachel in her heels, but not short enough that she can’t see the way Rachel’s eyes go wide. With a glitch-stutter, Rachel stops talking; her mouth hangs open, for a beat, and her eyes are wide wide wide. Sarah feels a mean satisfaction at noting that Rachel is _afraid_ , but that’s not quite right, she knows that expression on her face, knows—

Oh no.

_Oh_ no.

Sarah knows that expression on her face. It looks the way Sarah had felt when Cal kissed her for the first time, the lines of her face laid open and vulnerable, a desperate plea for _more of this_.

Rachel’s turned on by having Sarah this close, this close and this angry. The thought lands with a dull weight in Sarah’s head and there is a blinding second where she thinks, urgently, _be disgusted, be horrified,_ quick _, before it’s too late_. But all she is thinking is _more of this_ , with some hysterical twist of anger. (All she is thinking is finally, something she can use.) There is an aching second where the horror should be, and to fill it she fists her hands in Rachel’s blazer and yanks her forward, closes those final inches, and smashes Rachel’s mouth against hers.

For one giddy second Sarah thinks Rachel’s mouth is going to taste sweet, like lying. But it just tastes like Sarah’s mouth, which is to say: not like very much at all.

Sarah kisses Rachel’s mouth – Sarah kisses Sarah’s mouth, and it just feels like Sarah’s mouth, that dead flesh. Dead and unmoving and then something _snaps_ , an almost audible cracking sound; Rachel kisses her back, hunger heavy on her tongue and lips, kissing Sarah like she owns her, like she chose this.

_No_ , thinks Sarah – Rachel Duncan, she knows, owns nothing. She especially does not own Sarah. Sarah pushes Rachel forward with those same fists, still (hopefully) wrinkling the fabric of Rachel’s blazer, shoves her against the wall of her office and attacks. She kisses Rachel the way she wishes she could punch her, kisses Rachel like a fight, sinks her jaws into Rachel’s lips and unclenches her hands from Rachel’s clothes so she can reach underneath them, claw at the skin of her back, ribs. Sarah has spent far too long sitting in that chair, with no choice but to sit dumb and watch Rachel Duncan do what she does best – but sex, well, that’s always been Sarah’s weapon. Weapons are used to hurt people. That hot anger in Sarah’s stomach is screaming delight as she rips Rachel open – for the first time in weeks, it feels like she’s _winning_ something.

And Rachel just takes it. She gasps some surrender-sound into Sarah’s mouth when Sarah hurts her, tangles her fingers into Sarah’s hair and _yanks,_ but: she does not move herself away from the wall. Not even a little bit. A small rational part of Sarah thinks that Rachel must want this very, very badly, to not fight.

Or maybe she’s just not used to fighting with her body – especially not against Sarah. Sarah thinks of the way Rachel had trembled against the desk when Sarah had fired the gun; it makes her so angry, and all she can think to do is form her mouth into a gun and keep kissing with it. Anger builds and builds in her with no outlet, snarling in her belly, sending heat ricocheting through her veins and muscles and skin and into Rachel’s skin. But Rachel’s skin can’t hold it; Rachel’s skin is just Sarah’s skin, and it’s a circuit that drives Sarah to new and dizzying heights of anger. Finally she pushes back from the wall, pushes away from Rachel and looks at Rachel standing there. Rachel’s all ripped up, blouse and blazer rumpled and shoved up to bare the marks of Sarah’s nails all over her skin. Her lipstick is smeared, and Sarah runs her tongue over her teeth to feel it slip and slide. Sarah’s mouth tastes like metal – her teeth, she realizes, must be red with lipstick. Or blood. Maybe both; she doesn’t care, much.

Sarah looks at Rachel, whose chest is heaving and whose face is lit up with some sort of shivering, ecstatic high. She looks _naked_ with the delight of this; Sarah remembers Rachel’s face, when Sarah had lifted the gun away from her head, and feels suddenly and deeply sick.

The two of them look at each other, for a second, and then Sarah takes a few shaking backwards steps and walks away.

(She can’t sleep that night, curled up on Felix’s couch; every time she closes her eyes she just sees that look of surprise on Rachel’s face, over and over and over, and some hot and bitter hunger swells in the pit of her stomach. With a choked sigh she shoves her hand into her underwear and ruts against it, biting her lip hard, until she comes.

She can almost pretend she feels better.)

* * *

She goes back, the next week, because what other choice does she have. Silence, she knows, will only be taken as agreement; silence, she knows, will only be taken as Rachel’s victory.

This is not Rachel’s victory.

So.

Sarah throws her hood over her head like some sort of armor, leaves her brother, leaves her sisters – Alison and Cosima only a phone call away, Helena watching her with lidded eyes from her den behind Felix’s easels – leaves her daughter, prowls through the empty white hallways and throws herself into the same chair. Same room. Same threats. Same hungry Rachel-eyes, real and painful as wounds above that same plastic smile.

It’s like nothing’s changed. Sarah’s mouth still tastes like Sarah’s mouth.

And she is still _so_ angry – if sex is a weapon her anger has its finger curled around the trigger, hot and twitchy and impulsive. She wants to rip Rachel apart, still, for her plasticity, her lies, for wanting something like this, for her want making _Sarah_ want something like this. She wants to rip Rachel apart, but first she wants Rachel to acknowledge that Rachel wants that too.

Rachel does not acknowledge that. Threats drip their slow way from between Rachel’s teeth, like Chinese water torture in an otherwise silent room. Drip. Drip. Drip. Sarah gives her token agreement to some things, spits back others. Drip drip drip. Eventually it’s over, and Sarah practically vaults out of the chair, stalks away.

It feels like running.

But it’s _not_.

* * *

What is running, probably, is her refusal to go back the next week. She can’t do it. Instead Sarah takes the stairs down from Felix’s loft two at a time and heads out into the city, away from the skyscrapers she can feel looming over her and down into some seedy bar whose name she’ll never remember. She drinks and drinks and when she judges enough time has passed she slinks back to the loft like a kicked dog.

“Well, you look miserable,” Felix says cheerily when she makes it through the door. “Her Majesty make another bullshit decree, then?”

“Somethin’ like that,” Sarah says in response, and throws herself onto the couch, buries her face in the cushions, lets the throb of guilt pealing through her like a bell grow and consume her.

There’s a rustling and Sarah shifts her head from the couch, sees Helena looking at her, head cocked to the side. _Christ_ , she can move fast.

“Is there a problem,” Helena says low, dangerous, and Sarah says “ _No_ , meathead, there’s not a problem. Just…” She sits up in order to wave her hand vaguely through the air. She has a sudden and ridiculous urge to say _grown-up things_ , but that’s not right at all. “The people who made us don’t feel like bloody _helpin’_ us, is all.”

“Should not have played God,” Helena murmurs, “if they were not ready to answer prayers.” Seemingly appeased, she slithers back to wherever in this apartment she spends her time, like a snake returning to under a rock. Hidden predators.

It seems like everyone in Sarah’s life is a predator, now. That thought lingers in the back of her mind for a long time before she is able to eventually fall asleep.

* * *

She does go back the next week, feeling like a dog on a chain composed of the nervous fidgets of Alison’s hands and the tremors that rustle under Cosima’s skin. Sarah moves through the building like a ghost, door hall hall hall door, into Rachel’s office – but as soon as she’s through that door Rachel is _on_ her, slamming Sarah against the wall of her office, nearly missing a shelf of pretentious-looking glass instruments. They wobble, dangerously, when Sarah’s back hits the wall.

Rachel’s face, too close to Sarah’s, is livid – Sarah can see the way her lipstick is slightly off, as if it’s been drawn on with a shaking hand. Then Rachel kisses her, anger and hunger and fight, her mouth sharp like a knife. Sarah kisses back, on instinct, meeting fury with fury – when she’s about to _think_ , though, Rachel pulls back. She cradles Sarah’s face in some mockery of tenderness and hisses, “You do not get to _leave_. _Nobody_ leaves.”

Sarah, furious, _shoves_. She flips the two of them, so it is Rachel who has a wall at her back, and watches Rachel’s face crack and reform itself around a sudden honesty. “ _That’s_ what this is?” Sarah spits. “You’re throwing a fit because one of your toys walked away? God, you’re just a spoiled _kid_ —”

She’s gone too far. Rachel makes a low scream in the back of her throat, surges forward – her body is too close to Sarah’s, skin too hot – and kisses Sarah; Sarah can feel her unsaid words melting on her tongue, bitter and poisonous. She kisses Rachel back in a fury of teeth and tongue. Rachel meets her, goes higher, goes faster, anger ricocheting between the two of them and escalating each rebound. Sarah’s mouth tastes like blood. She’s not sure whose blood it is – who bit first, who bit nastier – but all that matters is that the whole world stinks of it. Rachel’s hands are tangled into Sarah’s hair and she _yanks_ , viciously, licking the resulting hiss of pain from Sarah’s mouth. Her mouth is a smirk against Sarah’s and Sarah hates her. Sarah _hates_ her. She growls, low in her chest, and shoves a leg between Rachel’s thighs, grinds upwards.

Rachel’s mouth opens against Sarah’s, soundless and soft, and Sarah takes advantage of the opportunity to bite her lips again. She hopes they bruise. She hopes every time Rachel Duncan tries to say something for the next week her lips hurt, and she remembers that Sarah _beat_ her. She doesn’t stop kissing Rachel, keeps it relentless and hurting, hopes every second that passes is a clear message: _I beat you I beat you I beat you_.

It’s Rachel who breaks the kiss, and it’s Rachel who pulls Sarah’s head back by her hair – so hard Sarah’s eyes water, which only sends the anger in her chest roaring harder how _dare_ she, how dare she make Sarah feel anything close to crying about this – and bites the skin between Sarah’s neck and shoulder in a desperate, animal reflex. Sarah’s hips buck despite herself (her body moving for flight) (her body moving for fight), but all that does is twitch her leg and make Rachel shudder. She’s practically latched onto Sarah’s skin, like a parasite. Like a _parasite_. Sarah shoves her hands up Rachel’s skirt and carves nails down the backs of her thighs, and that’s enough to get Rachel to release her jaws – all she does is bite again, though, making a collar of bruises around Sarah’s throat.

Sarah’s fingers find lace and she shoves two fingers inside, without warning; Rachel’s _dripping_ wet, and with the first push of Sarah’s fingers Rachel abandons Sarah’s neck, goes limp against the wall. She makes a high banshee sound Sarah doesn’t ever remember making in her life – of course _now’s_ the time Rachel proves her difference, with Sarah’s fingers in her cunt. Sarah pins Rachel to the wall with one hand and fucks her with the other, rough and merciless. Watches the way Rachel falls apart, with her lipstick smeared, eyes wide, dress mussed, scratched and bleeding.

_Good_ , Sarah thinks, and Rachel comes.

* * *

It becomes a sick sort of routine – they play at negotiation for a while and then something will snap, and Sarah has Rachel pinned against the wall. It’s another sort of negotiation entirely, in that there is no pretense to it: Sarah wants and Sarah takes, Rachel wants and Rachel takes, each of them equally furious and equally desperate to stop the other from winning _anything_.

It’s a fight, and Sarah thrills at finally being equally matched. Rachel knows all of Sarah’s weaknesses, here – that point between pleasure and pain that gets her shivering, whining – but it’s the same for Rachel too. Bruise for bruise, scratch for scratch. (And Rachel’s always known Sarah’s weaknesses, anyways; that was the point, wasn’t it, that’s why Sarah is always always coming back. Back to that skyscraper office, back to the DYAD, back to this. Now she wears her weaknesses on her skin, and somehow it feels safer.) Pull my hair, I’ll pull yours. Their backs are both bruised from walls.

Fucking Rachel is more honest than talking to her, and Sarah’s not sure what _that_ says. Not sure what it says about Rachel. Not sure what it says about Sarah, what _any_ of this says about Sarah, how it sets off some fireworks in her to get her hands around Rachel Duncan’s neck. Sarah’s hands around Rachel’s neck, a reverse of their normal choking: Rachel can weave a noose for Sarah, spider-steady, but Sarah trusts her own hands more. Sarah likes making Rachel put _effort_ into this, this façade, thinking of her waking up and spending an hour in front of the mirror – alone – to repair the damage that Sarah has done. God knows Sarah has spent enough time trying to fix the ways Rachel has damaged Sarah, damaged everyone Sarah loves. Really this is what Rachel deserves: blood on her skin, and bruises.

What makes her sick, twists her insides up with some hot sick nastiness, is how much Rachel _likes_ it. Oh, she fights – and fights and fights, bruising Sarah for every bruise she gets, sending Sarah stumbling into DYAD bathrooms and wiping blood from her skin with paper towels under sallow fluorescent lighting. Rachel fights, but there is always that _break_ when Sarah’s hands are around Rachel’s wrists like manacles, when her mouth burns Rachel like a brand and Rachel melts underneath her, goes shivery and pliant.

“You love this, don’t you,” Sarah hisses in Rachel’s ear one day far too far in, her hand up Rachel’s skirt, watching Rachel Duncan collapse with that usual hungry satisfaction. Rachel’s eyes are glassy and Sarah bites, hard, at the skin under Rachel’s ear. Rachel hisses, but she blinks and Sarah says it, more insistently: “You _love_ this, you sick bitch. You love _losing_.”

Rachel lets loose some aborted sound that could be a laugh. It’s not enough. Give Rachel words and she’ll make a noose, though, so Sarah kisses her instead to taste confession on Rachel’s tongue. Rachel’s tongue is her tongue, but Rachel’s confession is not Sarah’s confession: Sarah has nothing to confess and no one to confess it to. This is – this isn’t something worthy of a confession, not really.

What does she say? She already knows the sounds of her own moans, she already knows the place to bite down. _Forgive me,       , for I have sinned. I have kissed my own clone and I have liked it. I have liked the way her mouth fits against mine._ (And her teeth on my skin, and my teeth on hers, and it is so _easy_.) _I have liked understanding exactly how something goes for the first time in too long._ (So easy. She’s given up on morals, given up on feeling guilty – Rachel deserves blood on her skin, Rachel deserves some understanding of her own mortality.) _I have liked the certainty of winning._ (She doesn’t know if she’s winning.) (She’s winning. There has to be some victory from this, from Rachel Duncan’s unconditional surrender.)As if. How does she explain? For the first time, she’s understanding the insistence of everyone around her: keep your secrets.  

When she tears her way out of the DYAD she says nothing. She shoves her hood up, pulls her hair down around her neck, swallows any thought of confession so that her mouth tastes like ash. Goes back. Lies. Calls Cosima on Skype, watches the way the word _hope_ distorts itself as it falls from her mouth into the webcam, webcam to screen, screen to Cosima’s eyes. She pretends that the lie is in the distance, the distortion.

The lie isn’t there. The lie is settled under Sarah’s tongue, and it is growing, and it is sour in her mouth. It is sour in her throat and sour in her stomach, and the only time she feels anything like better (not anything like herself) (this is an important difference) is when she can see that Rachel Duncan is worse than her, worse than her, every definition of worse than her. Wall, desk, chair, skin and skin and skin; stop talking, stop winning, say that you are no better than me, say that you are _worse_ than me say that you _want_ this.

All these things are true, and Sarah knows it, and Rachel knows it. They kiss so Sarah can devour confession off of Rachel’s tongue.

Then Sarah leaves – it is something like running – and lets Rachel do what she would have done _anyways_. Give them these small mercies, which is the most Rachel is capable of. Sometimes Sarah chokes concessions from the back of Rachel’s throat, but the thought of bringing her family into this makes her sick as sick and so she does not. (That’s who she is, anyways, right? Selfish. Worthless.) (But Rachel is worse than her, and so—) _Sorry_ , she thinks to her family. She’s their hope, and she is not giving them hope. She’s their hope, and all she has is guilt; so she loses it in blood and she passes it from her mouth to Rachel’s, the same high as Rachel’s fingers in her cunt.

But eventually she leaves, spits out the blood in the sink on the way out and tastes the lie in the rust-tang of her mouth. It is enough to fool her sisters, fool Felix Cosima Alison Helena into thinking that she is someone who is worthy of them, that she is someone who has ever been worthy of them.

And, oh, for Felix Cosima Alison this is enough.

But Sarah thinks Helena _knows_.

She can’t decide what’s worse, the sheer hopeful ignorance of Alison, when Sarah sees her – thanks tumbling out of her mouth like spat-out pills – or the way Helena looks at Sarah, when Sarah walks in the door, Helena’s eyes dark and heavy as the bruises that burn under the collar of Sarah’s shirt. Part of Sarah wants to whirl on her sister, scream: _How dare you judge me for this. How dare you hate me. Helena, Helena, didn’t you feel like God with your hands around my neck? Helena, Helena, don’t you know better than anyone what it’s like, to hate someone’s words so much all you can do is break them?_ (The weight of “You’re nothing to me,” after all, is still heavy on the back of her tongue.) _Forgive me for this, sister, forgive me like I have forgiven you. Sister, I’m doing this for you—_

But she’s not, and she is not sure she wants Helena to forgive her, and she is not sure she doesn’t deserve whatever hate Helena would be willing to give her. Instead she doesn’t look at Helena, when she walks into the door, when she comes home. If she comes home. Sometimes she comes home.

Sometimes she doesn’t.

There are a lot of things she is not looking at, these days. She is not looking at Helena. She is not looking at the bruises that dapple her skin, like fruit-rotting. She is not looking at any of the mirrors in Rachel Duncan’s apartment – she is not looking in her eyes there, not anymore, because she is growing sick at how little she is able to recognize herself.

When she looks into the mirror, that abyss, all she can see is the sharpness of Rachel’s eyes, those wounds dripping pus, those shames. She doesn’t look. She shoves Rachel against the headboard, instead, and looks at the bruises on Rachel’s skin instead of looking at other things. Like Rachel’s eyes.

They’re not the same. The bruises on Rachel’s skin aren’t the same as the ones on Sarah’s, they’re _not,_ they’re different because—

because—

because—

At some point they’ve moved to Rachel’s apartment. Sarah doesn’t know. Sarah doesn’t care, she _doesn’t_ ; mostly she doesn’t want to care. If she starts caring she will start noticing, start noticing the way she is increasingly starting to feel like a dog on a chain. The thing that Rachel has always wanted her to be, she is. Heel. Sit. Stay, and wipe the blood off yourself with my towels, and clean yourself up in _my_ bathroom, mine, mine.

_No_ , thinks Sarah – Rachel Duncan, she knows, owns nothing. She especially does not own Sarah.

Right?

But there is the blood, like proof.

_There_ is the blood, Sarah thinks in a sharp hiss as Rachel’s nails carve down her back, stinging and angry, hot sharp sacrifice pain. Sarah yowls into Rachel’s mouth, tears at the skin of Rachel’s lip with her teeth. There is the blood. Sarah imagines it staining Rachel’s sheets; no one would know she was here, no one would know it wasn’t just Rachel’s blood. She shoves Rachel to the bed, hands on Rachel’s shoulders, settles on the other woman’s hip and watches. As always, Rachel’s gone all pliant with being pinned. Her eyes are wide and white as the sheets are. Were. Sarah rolls her hips forwards in something like the thrust of a knife, and Rachel’s pupils bloom: there. There is the blood.

Then Sarah remembers what that’s proof of, and she drowns the guilt in the taste of her mouth.

* * *

There is the blood, on Sarah’s neck, in bright little beads like jewelry. It’s some strange stretched point between night and morning and she’s looking at herself in the bathroom, all black and blue, all bruises. The night before this is blurred, like a fogged mirror. She doesn’t think too heavily on it. She doesn’t really want to remember, only wants the dull satisfaction that sits heavy as a rock in her belly. She doesn’t want to remember. She doesn’t know why she’s looking in the mirror, cataloguing all those bruises.

But that’s not all she’s cataloguing: she's looking at herself, picking apart the pieces and realizing that—

She doesn’t recognize herself. She can’t find the parts of her that are not RachelJennifer, DanielleAlison. Helena, even. There used to be some – some _thing_ about her that made her Sarah, she knows. She wonders when she lost it.

She wonders when she stopped fighting.

Because what this was about (if it was about anything, if there was _thought_ in that second before _action_ ) was making Rachel Duncan lose, making her understand that she could lose. Making them both something like even. A fight, with a winner, with a victor. But, again: here is Sarah in Rachel’s bathroom, with Rachel’s bruises all over Rachel’s ski—

Sarah’s skin.

_Shit_.

What would make her feel better, she knows, is to go back into the other room and kiss Rachel. Grind against Rachel’s hand, Rachel’s fingers, until she forgets that she ever looked in this mirror at all.

She could, couldn’t she? Rachel is lying on the bed, in there, and is just as much on a precipice as Sarah. Just as tentative. For once they are on equal footing, with this – for once they need each other. Without someone to fight you fight yourself. Without yourself to fight, who do you fight, anyways. They’re equal on a battleground of skin-on-skin, but nowhere else; to go back would be to lose, yes, but it would also be the only way Sarah knows anymore how to win.

And she wants to. But she can’t stop looking at the mirror, wondering when her eyes got so damn hungry. She feels sick. She feels hungry, and she feels sick, and she hates it. Thinking that, that she hates it, Sarah sees a spark of something like anger in her eyes; _welcome back_ , she thinks wryly. It’s something like waking up, after a long sick dream. _Welcome back_.

Just like that: she can’t. She can’t keep doing this. Sudden as a broken bone, the sound of a gun firing, sudden as the action that propelled her into this in the first place. Done. Done. Done. If this was a fight, she would lose, but she thinks – it isn’t a _fight_ , is it? It’s a holding pattern. Bruises heal, blood vanishes down those anonymous drains. Sarah’s mouth, after all this time, tastes just the same. She can’t go back in there. She is no longer certain what she was trying to accomplish, only that she knows it didn’t work.

It doesn’t feel good. She doesn’t _want_ to, selfishly; if it’s a holding pattern it’s a damn satisfying one. It would feel good to let Rachel suck this confession out of her mouth, but she can’t. The weight of it is not like a stone lifting, but it is something of a relief anyways. Done, with this. Left alone with her shame. Left alone, with nothing different.

What’s changed? Nothing, but that’s the point. Sarah looks at herself in the mirror. Looks at herself. Puts the towel down, and looks at the way her knuckles are free of blood.

She walks back into the other room and gathers up her clothes, not saying anything, not looking; she can feel the tug of Rachel’s gaze on her skin like a leash, but she doesn’t look up.

“What are you doing,” Rachel snaps, but Sarah can hear the uncertainty in her voice.

“I’m leaving,” Sarah says, calm like a storm’s eye, that midpoint between violence and violence. “I’m done, Rachel.”

Sarah hears rustling, ignores it, ignores it, keeps moving – she’s trusting the same action that got her into this to get her out. Keep moving. Keep running. (Sometimes it seems like all she knows how to do is run – run towards things. Run away.) Anger’s flooding through her, sick, with every heartbeat, but she shoves it into her limbs and throws on her shirt, shoves on boots.

There’s a vice grip on Sarah’s wrist and she looks up, meets her eyes. Rachel’s looking at her with some carrion anger, a desperate hungry thing.

“You’re being ridiculous,” she says, reasonably. She sounds so reasonable. Give Rachel words and she’ll weave a noose – and Sarah knows how to shut her up, has always known. She looks at the hand around her wrist instead, though. Look at that. She’s made Rachel just as much a creature of action as she is. What have they done to each other.

“Ridiculous,” Sarah scoffs, yanking her hand back, “right. Know what’s ridiculous?” She sweeps a hand around, gesturing at the room, Rachel, herself. “This. This is sick, alright, and I’m _done_.”

Rachel recoils like a cat sprayed with water, and scoffs back, a mirror of Sarah’s own face. “As if anything has changed,” she says angrily. “Now’s hardly the time for a conflict of _morals_ , Sarah.”

Well, she’s right – nothing has changed, and Sarah still wants everything she did want. Sarah still wants her family to be safe, beneath everything, beneath all those other dark hungry wants. Sarah still wants to make Rachel understand a lot of things. She doesn’t think Rachel’s going to understand, though, and the more Sarah stands here and tries to talk, say, _there are mirrors everywhere in this bloody apartment and I’m in none of them_ , the more hold Rachel has on her.

Sarah says nothing. Sarah swallows her words, and they burn like poison all the way down. They burn like Rachel’s lips on her skin, and other things unsaid. She sucks her lip between her teeth – she’s not sure when she picked up that habit, only that she’s grown too used to having her own lip between her teeth. So she does that, looks at Rachel – looks at all the marks she’s left on Rachel, bruises that will vanish under concealer come morning.

What the fuck has changed.

She keeps shaking her head and walks backwards one, two steps; turns around, heads for the door.

She leaves Rachel broken like a mirror behind her, and goes.

**Author's Note:**

> My fire is wild  
> My rage is deep  
> One black eye  
> Busted teeth
> 
> Feel my fury!  
> Oh, oh, oh, oh-oh oh-oh  
> You really light me up!  
> Oh, oh, oh, oh-oh oh-oh  
> \--"Fury Oh Fury," Nico Vega


End file.
